My parents live in an area where power is regularly out for a few days at a time in winter after storms and is now being regularly cut in summer by PGE for fire risk. For years they made do with various portable generators including a few year old predator model. While the name brand Honda/Yamaha/Generac models are great and last forever, the Chinese units that are branded by whomever is selling them are still a decent value. The only real issue is that they don't make clean power compared to the name brand units. With a typical outage my parents would roll the generator out and use an extension cord to feed the refrigerator, satellite, and internet router (their essentials). This used to work fine but would kill the router every other year. Now however, the satellite and routers being sold today are so sensitive that they fail after only a few hours on cheap generators. After replacing sensitive equipment a few times they finally bit the bullet and did a propane whole house unit with auto transfer switch. Now the power is never out more than 30 seconds before automatically transferring.  Not cheap but neither is replacing anything with sensitive electronics every time you need to use a generator.